Throughout the collection, isorhythm and polyphony counterpoint evoke the subtle play between poetic theme and musical form found in the Ars Nova, while amplifying the dark philosophy of Range’s poetry, wherein the mechanics of medieval ink production described in the poem are beautiful and disturbing in the same gesture, with vibrant colors, destruction at a vast scale, and perduring doubt are inter-threaded. All this resonates with my hermeneutic works, such as Quintet l'homme armé, Floruit Egregiis, and La Déploration; these are works with complex relationships with history in which musical material from the past is to manifestly modern and often quite a severe effect. Here the concern is more technical: many of the songs have isorhythmic structures in them; the counterpoint frequently has rhythmic overlaps of the Ars Veterum; irrational meters akin to the red/blank ink metrical play of the Ars Nova. But, as with the poems, these evocations are technical; the devices of composition and the chemistry of the inks are connected to their origins in the monks and trouveres, scholars and musicians of the Early Modern.

Like the formes fixes of the Early Modern, the relationship of the written text to the composed music is more abstract than expressive, more like plainchant than art-song; at the same time, the mechanical character of the music could be heard as representing the biochemical operations in the production of ink ( "catch and crush the spiny snails, / then cut the glands out for two drops of milk / black as clotted blood, expelled when the whelks balk / to make the putrid dye worth more than pearls" from Tyrian Purple) juxtaposed with the dark reflections on divinity and its manifestation in the world of life ( “is it sin / or history or a whimsied hex that burns / all life to tar? We are dust, carbon / spilled out from your Word, a lamp overturned / into the pit of pitch beneath your pen, / the inkhorn filled before the world was born" from Lampblack).

A video work associated with the first movement of the work can be found HERE.